Trisha Yearwood Says Music Will Always Take Priority in Her Career

Trisha Yearwood wears a number of different hats these days: In addition to spending time on the road with her husband, Garth Brooks, Yearwood also has her own TV show on the Food Network, Trisha's Southern Kitchen; has written four cookbooks; has a line of products with the luxury kitchen store Williams-Sonoma; and recently launched her own furniture line. But all of those business endeavors take a backseat to her career as a singer, which Yearwood says will always remain her first love.

"I love all the stuff I get to do, but I have wanted to sing since I was a little girl," Yearwood recently shared with The Boot and other reporters. "It wasn’t even a choice. It was, 'This is who I am, how do I figure out how to do this?' So as long as I can sing, this is what I want to do.

"I love that I can do a lot of things, and I hope I don’t ever have to choose," she adds. "But if you made me choose, I would pick music every time."

Yearwood's newly launched furniture line was an unexpected addition to her busy life, but she's found that she enjoys it, as yet another way to express her creativity.

"My plate’s pretty full, but if something that comes along that seems interesting, I’ll take that meeting," explains Yearwood. "I wasn’t like, ‘I want to create a furniture line,’ but this company wanted to meet with me, and they came to see me on the road, and I just liked them so much as people. We clicked and I was like, ‘This would be really fun to do together.’"

And when Yearwood gets involved in a project, she goes all in. In her words, she's not just "a name on a piece of furniture, or a name on anything."

"I’m really involved to the point where they probably wish I wasn’t," she notes. "I don’t want to do it if I’m not in it ... We say no to a lot, but we say yes to the things that we think would be fun."

The Georgia native, who also hints she has not one but two music projects planned for next year, is wrapping up her time on the road with Brooks' World Tour. The trek, Yearwood says, has allowed her to return to some of her most-beloved hits, including one from 20 years ago, which has taken on a new meaning due to her own life experiences.

"When "How Do I Live" came out, it was a song for a lot of people that was about loss, or a memory of someone. And for me, it was just a love song," Yearwood notes. "And then my dad passed. And when my dad passed away, I had to go on tour right after that, and I took my mom with me. And I remember the first time I sang it without him, and I was like, ‘Okay, I get that now this song means a whole different thing to me than it did.’ So I would say that that song, every night, is a little bit different for me than it was in the beginning."

Ticket and venue information for Brooks and Yearwood's remaining World Tour dates can be found on her website.